A rather neat novelist origin story from science writer Sara Goudarzi, author of the soon-to-be-published The Almond in the Apricot. Her insights into the creative process and the writer’s craft that she had to learn when transitioning from writing science journalism to prose fiction ring true:
While I wrote several science articles a week, a consistent output, the pages of the novel came out in fits and starts. At times, I would steadily generate ten to twenty novel pages over the course of a week, and other times I would write nothing for months, even years, in part because I hadn’t yet learned that the writing practice it takes to produce a novel is different from that required for a shorter piece. As many would say, writing a book is a marathon, and I was a sprinter, engaged in bursts of writing with speedy editorial feedback and results that were published within a day or two, several weeks at latest. . . .
Economical writing in journalism, due to space limitations in a publication, is a necessity. In novel writing, my economical writing meant that I often got to the point too fast with too few words. Learning to slow down—to allow myself more words to create a mood, or capture a feeling—took effort, and a switch in thinking. At times, I’d force myself to sit with the pages for a long time, and try to take in the smells, sounds and contours and relay them with words; enough words to draw up a three-dimensional, movie-like scene, not just to convey a message.
There was a loneliness, too, to writing a novel. Whereas with articles, for which I spoke to sources and interacted with editors, with the novel, I was largely on my own—especially after having stopped workshopping the manuscript. And somewhere in that loneliness of the work, despite having most of a draft completed, I’d also lost the way to the finish line. At times, it felt like I was stranded so far out in an ocean that I couldn’t see, let alone make my way to, dry land. . . .
At the end, I stopped waiting for the perfect stretch of free time or mindset. I grabbed whatever time I had, wherever I had it, no matter the distractions and kept going, every day, a little bit.
Writing a novel, I learned, is slow, often underwhelming, and happens one ordinary sentence at a time, until the sentences get better, until they’re sometimes good and—if we’re lucky—until the act becomes extraordinary.
Source: “What Science Journalism Taught Me about Writing Fiction“